


knight in kevlar body armour

by thirteenblackbirds



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, but it's byoc (bring your own context), can be read as a oneshot, feel free to also bring your own subtexts, some depictions of aftermath of torture, some kind of secret agent/special forces au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirteenblackbirds/pseuds/thirteenblackbirds
Summary: Claude doesn't mind being the damsel, but he could do without the 'in distress' part.Posted for the Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPfest.
Kudos: 9
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	knight in kevlar body armour

he counts ninety-eight hits before the ninety-ninth fails to land.

instead, an unexpected but welcome voice says, "that's favour number two, riegan."

he opens his eyes, squinting against the sting of blood and sweat. (he's well aware he doesn't look his best right now.) his captors are crumpled on the ground, one of them with his neck bent at a fatal angle.

"guess wishes do come true," he rasps cheekily at his unexpected saviour. he can't see very well out of his left eye, swollen as it is, but the gleam of her white-blond hair is unmistakable. 

she spares him a glance over her shoulder, lilac eyes darker in the harsh light of the single unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling. 

"can you walk?"

he wonders at that himself, stretching out a leg experimentally. winces at the piercing shock of pain when he tries to brace his weight against it. great. his ankle is at least fractured, if not outright broken. through the searing haze of pain that is his entire body, he'd failed to fully register that particular injury. he had passed out a few times during the strenuous questioning...

"probably not," he responds reluctantly. the words come out slurred even to his ringing ears. the long hours of interrogation over the past three (four? it's been hard to keep count without any windows) days have not done wonders for his hearing or enunciation. he wishes they hadn't hit his face quite so much. a burning breath in reminds him that his rib cage had not exactly been spared.

her look as she turns to him flickers down his bruised and bloodied body.

"my eyes are up here," he jokes around the metallic taste of blood. 

her eyes snap to his, grim and impatient, brow furrowed as she obviously reconfigures plans in light of this new inconvenience. "linhardt, i need a more accessible exit route. we'll be about twenty percent slower so please ask caspar to adjust the countdown. tell him he'll have to deal with the paperwork, not to mention hubert, if he blows me up."

he wants to protest the revised timing, but given he's the one who doesn't have full mobility ... well. twenty percent is probably fair.

but first things first. "hilda?" the rest of his team had been on the outside, but hilda had come in with him. the number of hostiles inside the base had mandated a two-person team. they'd gotten unlucky -- a guard with food poisoning had led to an unscheduled change of patrols and they'd been caught en route to the target. he remembers with a grim satisfaction that they'd managed to take down eight of them before reinforcements had arrived to overpower them. he hasn't seen or heard hilda since. the first thing they'd done was to destroy his earpiece and methodically strip him of his weapons. 

her gaze cuts to him again from where she's eyeing the assortment of tools on the far wall with distaste. thankfully, most of them are still clean. "petra has her. she's fully mobile." 

relief washes through him. 

“come on, we don't have all day." in a fluid flash, she's in front of him, cutting through his bonds with a dagger that springs from her sleeve, then retracts just as quickly. she helps him up more gently than expected, looping one arm around him and slinging his right arm over her slim, muscled shoulders. he normally stands nearly a head taller than her, but is more than happy to lean heavily into her side as she keeps him upright, bearing his weight easily. her hair smells faintly of mint and bergamot. "unless you'd prefer to stay for the continued hospitality?"

"no thanks," he laughs, just a short huff of air that leaves his bruised abs aching in protest. "zero stars, do not recommend. the owners are probably just using it as a front for a drug den."

he sees the upturned corner of her smirk out of the corner of his eyes. "they'll be out of business soon."

"the package?"

"ferdinand has it."

that is a relief. he has absolute faith that hilda would not have given them any usable information (although she probably talked their ears off about her favourite stringing techniques and the relative pros and cons of various types of cord crimps) but he'd nevertheless worried that their blown operation had alerted their targets to their objective.

they walk silently through the warren-like corridors as quickly as they can manage with claude's limp. the pace edelgard sets is borderline punishing, but not unbearable, and she pauses every now and then to listen to linhardt guiding them over the comms. the explosives that caspar is setting up will take care of most of the hostiles, so they try to avoid patrols as much as possible. she only has to lower him to the ground once to grab her gun from its shoulder holster and step out behind a wall to fire two rapid shots. 

claude starts to recognize the surroundings as they go, from before he and hilda had been caught and black bags placed over their heads. they're close.

"hilda and petra are at the rendezvous point," she murmurs as they enter the hallway he recognizes as the entry point he'd used. a tension lifts from his chest.

his breathing is coming more raggedly now -- a change that edelgard notices from the telling flicker of her eyes in his direction. her grip around his hip tightens. "we might need a closer pickup point," she says, clearly addressing linhardt and whomever else is at the other end of the comms. "we're almost at the northwest exit." that latter bit is slightly redundant as her hacker has clearly had eyes on them this whole time through the base's security cameras.

"can you make it up these stairs?"

oh right, the stairs. he will be viciously pleased to see this base go down. his pain in his ankle is already excruciating as he considers the narrow metal steps. too narrow for two people to walk side-by-side. shit. well, he's certainly not going to die in here, so he says, "of course i can," and is determined to crawl up it if he has to.

luckily for claude, a loud "edelgard!" echoes from the top and he sees the distinctive robins egg blue hair of her explosives expert. he has two impressively large guns in his hands. "i'll cover you."

before claude can wonder at what this means, edelgard has slid the arm around his waist up slightly and bent to hook her other arm under his legs, picking him up smoothly and starting up the stairs, caspar guarding her back from the top. far from feeling embarrassed, after the initial surprise, he grins, knowing what a bloody mess his mouth is right now, and loops his arms to form a clasp around edelgard's neck.

"why, edelgard, if i had known i'd be playing the role of the damsel today, i'd have done my hair."

"don't be ridiculous," she replies as they reach the top, his weight not appearing to slow her pace at all. "you're a stray cat at best." she doesn't put him back down like he expects her to, apparently deciding that this way is much faster now that she no longer needs to have her hands free to draw her gun with caspar at her back. which is the story of how claude is rescued and then carried, bridal style, those last few steps out of a notorious drug cartel headquarters. 

he tells people the base exploded behind them as they walked out, the burning air at their backs, for the cinematic effect. if edelgard is there, she rolls her eyes and corrects that their chopper was at least 1 km away before caspar initiated the blast.

**Author's Note:**

> Super self-indulgent secret agent/special forces AU that I thought about expanding but in all honesty probably will not get to, so taking this chance to air it out and set it free into the world (hello, mixed metaphors). 
> 
> Brought to you by two mental images stitched together with the barest pieces of plot and setting: (1) Claude being the cheekiest, most irritating prisoner ever and looking Disturbingly Hot after being bloodied a bit (or a lot), and (2) Edelgard princess-carrying him out against a classic action-movie explodey backdrop.


End file.
